Huawei pushes enterprise

Huawei has signalled its global intentions for the enterprise market, launching its enterprise channel push complete with partner programmes, ICT training and certification courses in a bid to push further into the large enterprise and government market.

While the channel programme has been in play in New Zealand since last year – with Simms International (due to rebrand later this year as expressonline) the first global distributor Huawei signed – the company officially launched the two-tier partner programme at Cebit last month.

Vaughan Nankivell, Simms ANZ business manager for Huawei Enterprise, says while New Zealand is ‘a couple of months ahead of the game’ with the channel programme, the launch is significant as an indication of Huawei’s global intentions.

Launched in 2011, Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group is regarded as a threat to some of the long-standing market players, including HP and Cisco. Huawei Enterprise logged global sales contracts of US$3.8 billion in 2011, up from US$2 billion in 2010, while Huawei itself has seen ‘huge growth’, Nankivell notes.

William Xu, Huawei senior president and Huawei Enterprise Business Group chief executive, says: “An important component of our plan is to expand our reach by building a healthy channel partner ecosystem.

“Together with our channel partners, we intend to lead the industry with a dual devotion to customer-centric innovation and service, while tapping in to Huawei’s vast experience to help enterprise customers navigate the challenges and opportunities in today’s ICT era.”

While the global programme is a two-tier channel model with tier-two resellers including platinum, gold and silver partners, Nankivell says New Zealand has avoided the ‘metal metaphor’ opting not to run with the platinum, gold and silver differentiations.

“We didn’t want to put the usual suspects into pigeon holes and wanted to provide an equal opportunity for resellers to create their own destiny,” Nankivell says.

The company has 15 partners in New Zealand and Nankivell says rather than going broad, the company is being ‘very focussed’ here.

Huawei also launched its Enterprise Training and Certification Programme at Cebit, saying the programme covers ‘all ICT technical fields’ and has been positioned to ‘eventually become the leading ICT technical qualification’. The company says it aims to certify 300,000 professionals by 2015 and will also be recruiting partners to become Huawei Authorised Learning Partners.